


Just a slip of the tongue

by AllmyotherOTPs



Category: The Good Wife (TV)
Genre: F/M, The Affair, Why couldn't they just communicate?, season three
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-24
Updated: 2019-10-24
Packaged: 2021-01-02 13:01:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21162065
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AllmyotherOTPs/pseuds/AllmyotherOTPs
Summary: “I love you.”Will fucks up. Badly.





	Just a slip of the tongue

**Author's Note:**

> Set in season three, late in their affair.

He’s coming. And coming. And coming.

The orgasm feels like it’s never-ending, his entire body spasming and contracting with one primal goal only: To empty his seed into her body. He hears the sounds that are ripped from his throat as if from afar, as if they are not coming from himself. He’s not quite sure, but he thinks some of the sounds might form the word “Alicia”.

When he finally collapses on top of her, his nose buried in her dark hair, he struggles to catch his breath. A thin film of sweat covers his skin. Her hands gently stroke the skin of his back, tracing his spine lazily with a fingernail. He knows that she likes this – his weight on top of him, after. So he doesn’t move. He’s glad she likes it, because honestly, he’s not sure if he would be able to move right now if he tried.

Her breathing is somewhat less ragged than his. She was a bit ahead of him. She came a couple of minutes before he did. And five minutes before that, too.

He breathes in the scent of her - her conditioner, her perfume. Her skin. Their sex.

She contracts her pelvic muscles around him, and he groans. She chuckles lightly, he can feel it more than hear it. He turns his head slightly - it’s the one movement he thinks he might be able to do at the moment - and kisses her neck. His tongue slips out, tasting the salt of her sweat. It mingles with the sweetness of her skin, creating the taste that is all _her_.

“I love you.”

And it’s not that scary, not at first, because lately, he’s thought about those words. A lot. He’s thought about them practically every time they are in the same room, and pretty often when they’re not, too.

But then he feels her small, slim body freeze underneath his, and that’s when his brain, clouded by oxytocin and exhaustion, realizes that he actually said those three words_ out loud_.

He holds his breath, terrified.

Fuck.

This, _them_, has boundaries. Some of the boundaries are physical, such as the walls of their respective apartments, or the impersonal privacy of hotel rooms during lunch break. Those boundaries are easily defined, and easy to handle. Others are more abstract, such as not letting their affair affect their professional lives - which is getting increasingly complicated, now that Diane is onto them. He thinks that more people may know, too, or at least suspect. He knows it’s only a question of time. And then, of course, there are the big ones. With one exception – the fact that he’s her boss – those boundaries are all about her. Alicia’s husband, her husband’s career, the press - and most of all, her children.

These are the boundaries they have talked about more or less openly. But there is something else, too. Something that has been left unsaid, yet it has always been there, implied. That this – them - cannot _mean_ anything.

And that’s the boundary he’s been struggling with the most. He’s almost messed up before. Such as the first time he visited her apartment after they started sleeping together, and she let him into her bed. When he accidentally said that he loved her on the phone. The first time they woke up together – it was a Saturday morning, the kids were at Peter’s, and the sunshine made her skin glow. When he met Zach, and made a complete fool of himself because he was trying too hard. He wanted her son to like him, he wanted it so badly.

He knows he should say something. Laugh it off. Blame it on his post-coital, hormone-clouded brain – which wouldn’t be a lie, not technically. But he can’t think of anything to say. Absolutely nothing. The silence grows more uncomfortable by the second. She’s still holding him, but her fingernail is no longer tracing his spine. Her body is tense underneath his, her breathing shallow.

He rolls off of her, his softening cock slipping out of her. He lies next to her on the bed, on his back, their bodies not touching. He covers his eyes with his elbow, still breathing heavily.

God, he’s fucked this up. He _knew_ there was only one way of keeping her in his bed, of keeping her in his _life_, and that was not allowing things to get too serious. He knows she can’t. No, she _won’t_. Not with the children, and Peter, and his career, and Eli, and…

“Will?” Her voice is barely more than a whisper.

“Yes,” he somehow finds air in his lungs to answer.

There’s a long silence. He supposes that she wants him to come up with some kind of excuse. Like he did when he slipped up so royally on the phone earlier. He could practically hear her relief over the phone when he said it was just an accident. When they talked about it afterwards, she was very quick to talk about how she said to lots of people that she loved them, even her mother in law, and then she refused to discuss it further. Even when – or especially when, come to think of it - he said that he wasn’t interested in anyone but her.

And the next time they met, alone, in the privacy of yet another hotel room, she rode him harder than ever. There was something almost desperate over her.

After, he had thought that there was something almost perverse about it. That his assuring Alicia that he _didn’t_ love her made her practically insatiable.

“I’m sorry,” he says. And he is. For a lot of things. He’s sorry for telling her something she is not ready or not willing to hear, even though it’s the truth. He’s sorry that she is married. He’s sorry that she’s cheating on her husband because of him. She has never been the cheating type, yet here they are, in his bed. He’s sorry for messing up her professional life by sleeping with her even though he’s her boss.

He’s sorry for waiting 20 years to tell her how he feels. 20 years of what-if’s and numerous mostly insignificant replacements in his bed.

“I’m sorry to… tell you like this. But it shouldn’t really be that surprising. I’ve told you twice before.”

After leaving that second voicemail, he barely slept for a week. Every time his phone rang, his heart would skip a beat. Every time she came into the room, he desperately hoped that she would say something. Anything. But she didn’t. It was as if it had never happened.

He can hear that she gets out of bed, and he thinks, this is it. She’ll leave and never come back. He opens his eyes, looking at her. She halfway to the bathroom, but stops, her large, brown eyes meeting his. She shifts uneasily, and his gaze drops lower, to between her legs, where his cum is trickling out of her, between her thighs. They’re not using condoms anymore. They haven’t since their first few times together. She has an IUD, and they both agreed to get tested. They’re clean. 

And exclusive.

And even though they assured each other that they could safely drop condoms because they wouldn’t sleep with anyone else, they never discussed if that actually _meant_ anything.

She escapes into the bathroom. He hears water running in the sink, she’s probably cleaning up. After a few minutes of silence in there, she finally returns.

He sits on the edge of the bed, just wearing the boxer briefs he found by the foot of the bed. The rest of his clothes are probably strewn somewhere in the hallway and living room. She is standing on the floor, halfway between the bathroom door and the bed, wearing one of his t-shirts. It was probably the only thing she could find in the bathroom, her clothes must be strewn all over his living room too. With her left hand, she twists the soft, worn fabric of the t-shirt, her knuckles white.

“I, uh…” She can’t quite meet his eyes. They flicker to his face, then back to the floor. “_Twice_?”

It’s written all over her face. He’s scared her off. He probably scared her right back to the safety of Peter’s bed.

He gets up, faces her. He realizes he’s never really faced her before, even though they’ve known each other for two decades. “It’s okay, Alicia,” he says dejectedly, shrugging. “I get it. I get that you don’t feel the same way. I get that I’m your rebound. A distraction from your messy marriage. But you _knew _that I love you. At least respect me enough not to lie to me. Not about this.”

Something passes over her face, and to his surprise, he realizes that her big, brown eyes are filled with tears. “When was the second time you told me that… you love me?” She can barely get the words out. How strange, he thinks, that this strong, brave woman is so afraid of talking about emotions.

“On the phone, a couple of months ago. When I accidentally let it slip as we said goodbye, remember? You were very quick to brush it off.”

“No, that’s the first time. The _only_ time.” He furrows his brow. “You don’t think that’s something I’d remember?” She snaps. “So what’s this other time you’re talking about?

He just stares at her, stunned. “In the second voicemail, of course. At Peter’s press conference.”

She licks her lips quickly, swallowing. “I only got one voicemail,” she says slowly.

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. You left _one_ voicemail, telling me that we should drop this. Drop us.”

“And then I changed my mind and called a second time, leaving a _second_ message,” he hisses. “Voicemails don’t just disappear. There were two.” He’s so tired of this. He goes to the living room, trying to locate his clothes. He really doesn’t want to have this conversation wearing just his boxer briefs. He finds his shirt and his jeans, pulls them on.

He’s had his heart broken by her several times already. Back at Georgetown, when she chose Peter without even really giving him a chance. When she never mentioned his voicemail. And, maybe, a little, every single time she has shut him out over these last few months. Every time she has shown him – always with actions, never with words, because they never _talk_ \- that he loves her more than she loves him. Or, what he only allows himself to think in his very darkest moments: Maybe he’s the only one who is in love at all.

And she knows it. She _has to_ know it.

He pours himself a glass of scotch, quickly downs it, and starts to button up his shirt. From the corner of his eye, he can see her slight figure in his old t-shirt. Her face has become very pale.

“Will, there’s… something I never told you,” she says slowly.

He grits his teeth. Over the years, there seems to be a lot she hasn’t told him. “Last year, when I was working on that corruption case with involving your friend Matthew Wade, I went through tapes of his phone taps. Remember?” He nods. “And you were on one of them. You were talking about how you had left two voicemails to a woman. You didn’t mention her name, but it was pretty clear from the context that you were talking about me.”

He refills his glass. He remembers that conversation all too well, because he very rarely has personal conversations like that - with anyone. Sure, he has a lot of acquaintances, drinking buddies and basketball buddies, but he’s never had a lot of _friends_. And he’s had very few – if any - close friends. In fact, Alicia – both at Georgetown and, much later, when she joined his firm – is one of the very few who might fit that description.

Matt doesn’t. And usually, Will wouldn’t confide in him, because well – he never really confides in anyone. But a week or so before that phone call, they had gotten wasted after a baseball game, and Will had told Matt quite a bit more than he had planned to about the whole mess he was in - being hopelessly in love with a married woman whose interest in him was uncertain at best. Matt, equally drunk, had said that Peter Florrick was an asshole and an arrogant, corrupt son of a bitch, and that Will would be doing Alicia a favor if he ended their marriage once and for all. “But getting together with _you_, though?” Matt had laughed, almost as drunk as Will had been, “Mrs. Florrick must really have a thing for assholes. Who would’ve thought she’d have such a terrible taste in men? She always looks so prim and proper.”

And that’s the reason why Matt had called him and pestered him about whether he’d finally done what Matt had advised him to do: Just fucking tell her already. 

He goes through what he can recall about the conversation with Matt in his head, but it was mostly just about what he said in the voicemail. Alicia already knows about that. So it’s not really that bad. Is it?

“You said that you had left this unnamed woman – me – two voicemails. But as I said, I only got one.” He opens his mouth to object, but she silences him with that stare she has sometimes, the one that tells him to just shut up and listen. She even uses it at work sometimes too, even though he’s her boss. No one gets away with it but her – and Diane. “You told Wade about the first voicemail, but when you were telling him what you’d said in the _second_ voicemail, there was a thirty second privacy lapse, so I couldn’t hear what you had said, except that it must have been… important.” She swallows. “I came to your office later to ask you about it, but then Tammy was there, and then I…” She shrugs helplessly, looking down.

Bad timing. Again.

This doesn’t really make sense, but he’s trying to piece it together. “So you knew you had gotten two messages from me,” he says slowly, “and that the second one had been deleted for no apparent reason, but you knew that the content of that voicemail was… major. And still, you chose not to pursue it. You never asked me about it.”

“Yes.”

“Why not?” He’s torturing himself now, he knows it. 

Alicia doesn’t answer his question at first. She pours herself a glass of scotch, too. He knows she doesn’t really like scotch. She takes a sip, making a face, but then gulps down another mouthful.

“I guess I could tell you a lot of excuses,” she finally says. “Excuses about Peter and our marriage, his career, the children…” She looks up at him, holding his gaze for the first time since she stood on the floor of his bedroom, his semen running down her thighs. She takes a deep breath, and her voice wavers slightly when she continues: “But I’m asking you now. What did the second voicemail say?”

He doesn’t answer at first. He thinks about all the times over the last 20 or so years he’s almost told her he loved her. That first night when they met at the pool party. But he didn’t, because how can you fall in love with someone after just a few hours? She’d think he was crazy. Then, law school – all the times he’d almost opened his mouth to tell her. But either he had a girlfriend, or she had a boyfriend, or she didn’t trust him because he fucked anyone in skirts and she knew it, or… _Peter_. And after Georgetown, when they lost touch, because he was pretty sure that Peter knew how he felt about his girlfriend, and that’s why Peter hated his guts. He never stopped thinking about her. Still, he’d almost picked up the phone. But then he read about their wedding online, and then – not very long after – he heard rumors that she was pregnant and was quitting her job.

That’s when he knew it was over. Really over. After the train wreck that was her parents’ marriage, he knew she would never let her children grow up in a broken family.

And then, more than a decade later, she was suddenly back in her life again, and he wondered if he had been given a second chance. But he was her boss, and she was _still_ married even though her husband had slept with a _prostitute_, for heaven’s sake, and their situation was even messier than it had been before.

Alicia hates messy. She always has.

He considers lying to her, but over the years, there have been so many lies and omissions between them. He’s had it.

“I told you to forget that first voicemail,” he says, his voice low. “I told you that I _did_ have a plan, and the plan was that I loved you. So there you have it – that’s the first time I told you that I love you.”

There’s a long silence.

“What else did the message say?” she finally presses him.

Dammit. Of _course_ she wouldn’t leave it at that. He swirls his glass, looking at the golden brown liquid covering the bottom of the glass. He takes a deep breath. “I said that I had probably loved you since Georgetown. I asked you to call me back. That we could meet and make a plan. And then I told you that if what I said didn’t make any sense to you, then… you could just ignore the voicemail, and it would be like nothing had happened.”

“So… when I didn’t mention the voicemail after, you thought that I…?” She doesn’t need to complete her sentence.

“Yes,” is all he can say.

She empties her glass in a few large mouthfuls. She has tears in her eyes, but it might be because of the alcohol. She’s holding the glass so tightly her fingertips are white.

“I’m really sorry, Will,” she finally says, and it sounds like she can barely get the words out. “I… I’m sorry.” She puts the glass down on the table, and starts gathering her clothes. She’s dressing fast, too fast, almost frantic. She tries to hide that she’s wiping a tear off her cheek, but he still sees it. “I never meant to hurt you.”

He helplessly watches her shed his t-shirt as she locates her own blouse, buttoning it unevenly in her haste. She finds one shoe in the hallway, the other near the couch. “I need to… I’m sorry. This is… pretty overwhelming.”

If there’s one thing Alicia has always excelled at, it’s ripping his heart out. And now he’s let her do it again.

When the door slams shut behind her, he sinks down on the couch, burying his face in his hands.

* * *

He doesn’t sleep.

* * *

She calls in sick on Monday.

She never calls in sick, even when she should.

He’s dreading going home, putting it off as long as he can. He didn’t change the sheets last night, he couldn’t make himself do it. He knows they’ll smell of her. Of sex. Of them.

When he’s finally home, it’s almost midnight. Her glass is still standing on the table. There’s lipstick on the edge. He tries not to think as he puts the glass into the dishwasher. He starts it, even though it’s nearly empty.

There’s a knock on the door. He knows who it is even before he opens it.

She’s casually dressed, in jeans, a white t-shirt and a grey cardigan. No make-up. Wordlessly, he lets her in. Because it’s what he’s always done: He’s let her in.

There’s a long, uncomfortable silence. She stands in the hallway, not taking her shoes off. He doesn’t invite her in, doesn’t offer her a drink.

“I’m sorry I called in sick today,” she finally says. “I wasn’t really sick, I just… I’ll tell them tomorrow that I took a vacation day instead.” She closes her eyes briefly, and he’s reminded of how he’s not just her lover, he’s also her boss. And she just told him she skipped work.

“I don’t care about that, Alicia,” he says tiredly.

“I was afraid,” she blurts out, so quickly she stumbles over her words. “That’s why I didn’t go to work. And I think there are a lot of… things I’ve been afraid of lately.”

“Such as what?”

“I’ve been afraid of what… this might mean.”

He doesn’t need to ask her what she means by “this”.

“I talked to Eli,” she continues. “Well, yelled at him is probably more accurate. He had my phone during the press conference. He confessed that he deleted your voicemail.” She grimaces. “He even claimed that it’s been eating at him every day since.”

“You don’t believe him?”

She shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t care what Eli Gold thinks or says. Not anymore.”

Walls. She’s putting up walls again, he realizes. She’s good at that.

She hesitates. “I’m sorry I left last night,” she says, clearing her throat before she can continue. “I know I must’ve been… that it’s a terrible thing to do after what you… said.” She waits, as if waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t. Finally, after an awkward pause, she continues. “I was wondering if it’s too late for us to make a plan.”

“What kind of plan?”

“I’m not sure. But that’s what I was hoping that we could talk about.”

He hesitatingly reaches out his hand, taking her much smaller hand in his. Her skin is warm and smooth. He knows her hands smell faintly of almond, from her moisturizer.

She takes a shaky breath, and her fingers close around his.


End file.
